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30 October 2007

Comments on the European Commission's Green Paper on the Future of the Common European Asylum System (CEAR) have been gathered together and made available online. Replies through 30 September 2007 were received from member governments, other governments, regional authorities, NGOs, and IGOs.

A recent New Issues in Refugee Research paper, entitled "Fortress Europe and the Iraqi ‘intruders’: Iraqi asylum-seekers and the EU, 2003-2007," contends that the influx of Iraqis seeking asylum has presented the EU with a test of their desire to implement a CEAR through the harmonization of their asylum systems. According to the author, the data "show that so far there is little indication of better convergence in national asylum practice or increased sharing of responsibility to accept asylum-seekers among EU states."

Human Trafficking:

The first EU Anti-Trafficking Day was held 18 October. The aim of the meeting was to endorse "recommendations on identification and referral to services of victims of trafficking in human beings" and "to debate an assessment manual comprising recommended indicators to evaluate and measure the results of anti-trafficking policy in all EU Member States." The web site for the meeting provides access to the various documents that were up for discussion and EU directives concerning steps already taken to combat trafficking.

In addition, a number of NGOs that work on trafficking issues presented a joint statement supporting the call for action made at the meeting.

29 October 2007

La Red de Información Humanitaria, or Redhum, was officially launched on the last day of the Global Symposium on Humanitarian Information. Redhum is a Spanish-language site that provides information on natural disasters and complex emergencies in Latin America and the Caribbean. It disseminates news, sitreps, maps, vacancy and training announcements, and serves as a regional counterpart to ReliefWeb.

The Global Symposium +5 ‘Information for Humanitarian Action’, which met from 22-26 October 2007 in Geneva, has video webcasts, PowerPoint presentations and photos at http://www.reliefweb.int/symposium/.

17 October 2007

Disasters now offers access to articles published online prior to their inclusion in the print edition; visit the OnlineEarly page for titles and abstracts.

Health and Human Rights will become an open access journal online as of the issue Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2008. For more information, visit the journal's web page.

New Issues:

Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 20, no. 3 (Sept. 2007) [contents]- Includes report of the 10th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration conference, a debate on forced migration studies, and articles on refugees in Glasgow, Melbourne, and Michigan, Japanese asylum policy, the economy of a refugee camp, and UNHCR's Convention Plus initiative.

Newsletter of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, no. 1 (Sept. 2007) [text]

15 October 2007

The first Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Management and Exchange, held in 2002, endorsed a set of principles "now recognised as standards for the collection, processing and dissemination of humanitarian information." The aim of the second Symposium, scheduled for 22-26 October 2007 in Geneva, is to build on the foundations laid five years ago by continuing to identify, discuss and make recommendations for information management approaches in the humanitarian community.

"Refugee Generating States, Global Inequalities, Feminization, and Individual Strategies: An Assessment at the Beginning of the 21st Century," Refuge and Rejection: The Humanities in the Study of Forced Migration (ASU, Oct. 2007) [text]

Sharpening the Strategic Focus of Livelihoods Programming in the Darfur Region: A report of four livelihoods workshops in the Darfur region (June 30 to July 11, 2007) (Feinstein International Center, Sept. 2007) [text]

Statistics on Displaced Iraqis around the World (UNHCR, Sept. 2007) [text]

Submission from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles in response to the Commission’s Green Paper on the Future Common European Asylum System (COM (2007) 301) (ECRE, Sept. 2007) [text]

11 October 2007

Following on from yesterday's post, podcasts represent yet another tool that can be used to share conference discussions with a wider audience. The Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) recently posted a podcast of "Can journalists and aid workers trust each other," a meeting held with "ALNAP and Reuters Alertnet to look at the relationship between journalists and aid workers, and the lack of trust that is often a central characteristic of this relationship." For more information about the meeting and access to the podcast, visit HPN's meeting page for the event.

10 October 2007

How can people monitor conferences that they are not able to attend? Here are a few newly available resources:

The International Metropolis Conference is currently under way in Melbourne. Christopher McDowell, the director of the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK (ICAR), is attending the conference and, in the process, providing brief summaries and assessments of the debates taking place through postings to ICAR's Policyblog. The first was posted on October 8th. The conference continues through the 12th. Presentations from past conferences are available on the Metropolis Project's web site.

The latest issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies has been published. It includes reflections on the last International Association of Forced Migration Studies (IASFM) conference, which was held in Toronto in 2006. A conference blog also provided summaries of quite a few of the discussions. Unfortunately, IASFM does not provide abstracts of past meetings on its web site.